[free California workers' compensation resources]

MicroSoft has no one to blame but themselves for my deleting MicroSoft Office. Well, its partly Dell’s fault too, but that’s a long story I’ll tell some other time. (Short version: Dell repaired a prior laptop and shipped it to a construction site in Oakland.)

OpenOffice.org released version 3.0 of their program on October 13, 2008. It was so wildly popular that their website was crushed under the overwhelming demand. The three most important things to know about OpenOffice are:

Its open source, so its completely free. So, there’s no reason not to give it a shot.

It can open, edit, and save to any MS Office 2000, 2003, 2007, and WordPerfect formats.

It can print or export any file to a PDF.

If you’re a Workers’ Compensation professional in California, you’re probably dealing with EAMS. Since filing things with EAMS means working with a lot of PDF’s. In order to keep from reinventing the wheel, it makes sense to save those PDF’s of the document cover sheets. But what if you need to make a small change later on? Well, OpenOffice v3.0 can help with that too.

Using an extension((basically a small program)) OpenOffice can open and edit and re-save a PDF file. Not even Adobe, the company that promotes the PDF format[1] , does a good job of opening and editing PDF’s.

This is a really big deal to me because editing saved PDF’s is going to save me a lot of time editing settlement documents and various pleadings.

Update

I wrote the above about a month ago while I gave OpenOffice 3.0 a shot. It won’t install on my Vista laptop but works great on my XP desktop. I’ve reverted to OpenOffice 2.4 on the laptop while I wait for a fix. OpenOffice 2.4 is still free, but it won’t open MS Office 2007 formats (which not everyone is using anyhow) and cannot edit PDFs.